What’s happening?

I coach women in mid-life to connect with what makes them feel alive - what moves them.

If you’re a woman in mid-life and have been struggling, there’s lots of things you might have tried. Maybe you’ve explored the hormonal angle. You’ve read Brene Brown. You might have enjoyed some (temporary) relief through intense spiritual or transcendent experiences. Perhaps you’ve explored whether you’re neurodiverse. And perhaps some relief emerged and yet, your day to day is still lacking the quality of peace and energy you long for.

Signs of mid-life awakening can look like:

• Often feeling overwhelmed; you are never on top of things

• Waking up at 3am with worries that don’t make a lot of sense (you’re totally capable of navigating these issues) then feeling tired but wired during the day

• Feeling irritable and snappy and losing perspective on everyday challenges

• Scrolling or tuning out more than you’d like

• Being triggered and overly sensitive to people and situations, but wishing you were showing up with more presence and perspective.

While all of this is frustrating, exhausting and confusing, life is not torturing us for nothing. These are common signs that you are longing for wholeness. To bring home parts of yourself that have been neglected thought the striving and busyness of your 20s and 30s.

For many of us, purpose and motivation are hidden under layers of pain. Moments where culture and people communicated to us - perhaps unwittingly - that we were lacking in some way. Perhaps by being ‘not enough’, or ‘too much’. The armour we built to protect our precious hearts might have served us well till mid-life. But by now, it might be starting to feel a little heavy.

The gold that comes out of meeting the pain that is entangled with our purpose and our gifts includes:

• The relief of connecting with people who care about the same things you do. You feel some momentum towards creative self-expression

• The issues that triggered you make you slightly annoyed. You can respond with more humour and a sense of possibility, rather than full body rage

• It’s easy to say no or yes to what comes up in your life. You spend less time ruminating and second guessing yourself

• Your advocacy in the world is fiercely loving, not a raging fire that leaves you exhausted

• You have a felt sense of clarity, calm and perspective. Some familiar playfulness you haven’t felt for a long time creeps back into your day.

How we work together

By now, you have developed effective strategies to respond to these stressful moments. Calling a friend, exercise, journaling, making changes to bigger parts of your life, like your job, healthcare program or key relationships.

My approach to coaching comes in when those strategies lose their effectiveness. It’s for reflective, emotionally in-tune, women who want to understand themselves at a deeper level. It’s for moments in your life where the frustration, uncertainty and disappointment is pushing you towards something different. It’s also for women who care deeply about what’s happening in the world, but are unsure about how to respond.

I would suggest that your response to stress is not your personality or something you can’t change. For most of us acting out can be traced back to a moment where we have lost connection with ourselves.

What do I mean by this?

Self-connection is a way of being and it is a lifelong practice. It can be difficult to sustain but can be intentionally cultivated. When we are in it, I call it self-leadership. Self-connection is the practices that takes you back home to self.

Self-leadership looks like courage, calm, confidence, connectedness, creativity, presence, playfulness and more. It looks like laughter throughout the day and clarity about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. It doesn’t mean life isn’t painful. But you develop the self awareness to seek the support you need when you are confronting sadness, grief or overwhelm.

Through self-connection we can navigate the delicate dance of meeting our own needs while relating to others and what is happening in the world. In self-leadership, we can stay rooted when everything around is unstable. We have this grounding because we are meeting what is happening in our lives. We are able to hold it and respond to it from a place of clarity. Not a grasping place of wanting it to be different because being with [the selfish colleague/your kids’ mess/an unfolding genocide in another country] is too painful, and you’d rather avoid it or pick a fight.

Self-connection means you can show up in your life with a sense of ‘rightness’. This goes for your internal dialogue, how you relate to people in your life and with the creative projects you are involved in.

"…The real revolution is not empowerment culture. It’s women being so connected to themselves and to nature that no one outside of them can control who they are" – Gabrielle Naomi (Chinese medicine doctor)